The present technique relates to an apparatus for controlling access to a memory device, and to a method of performing a maintenance operation within such an apparatus.
An apparatus used to control access to a memory device may receive access requests from a number of sources and may have access to a storage device in which the access requests to be issued to the memory device can be buffered. There are various types of maintenance operation that may be desirable to perform on at least some of the storage elements within such a storage device. For instance, certain maintenance operations may be performed to seek to improve the overall performance of the memory access operations, whilst other maintenance operations may be performed to seek to improve robustness, for example by seeking to detect occurrence of hard errors. However, the performance of such maintenance operations may impact on the overall performance of the apparatus.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved technique for handling such maintenance operations.